The Harvey Effect

In the past few weeks I have read close to 90% of the articles about Harvey Weinstein—a man I have known and loathed for twenty-five years—starting with the New York Times piece about his decades of sexual harassment settlements, and Ronan Farrow’s bombshell article in the New Yorker with accounts of rape. Once those two hit, the proverbial floodgates opened with more and more women coming forward with accounts of harassment and assault. After having heard dozens of stories about Harvey’s cruelty and physical violence from traumatized former employees, both men and women, I always knew that he was a monster, but I did not know the extent of the sexual harassment that went on, nor did I know that he was a rapist.

The “Harvey Effect” has subsequently taken down prominent men such as Amazon Studios Head Roy Price, Nickelodeon showrunner Chris Savino, screenwriter James Toback (who has now been accused of sexual harassment by over 200 women), celebrity chef John Besh, fashion photographer Terry Richardson, the publisher of Artforum Magazine Knight Landesman, political journalist Mark Halperin, and writer and editor Leon Wieseltier. We can only hope that these dudes will continue to fall like dominoes.

As an antidote to that cavalcade of jerks, I wanted to share this profile of Greg Asbed, a 2017 MacArthur Fellow who has spent most of his professional life fighting horrific labor abuses. Asbed was asked, “What was your path to this work?” and his answer was inspiring. “I’m a first-generation Armenian-American,” he said. “My grandmother moved to Syria from Turkey, but not of her own volition. There was the Armenian genocide; she lost her whole family except for one sister. She managed to survive the genocide by being bought and sold twice by the age of 13 — once to the Kurds, then by the Kurds to an Armenian family, which was my grandfather’s family. I have always felt a certain responsibility, as a bearer of DNA that was forged in the crucible of genocide, to the idea of universal human rights.”